Modern Romance

Warner Bros. Swipes Right on Worst Tinder Date Ever Movie Deal

Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015 - Day 2 at The Manhattan Center on May 5, 2015 in New York City.

By Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Well, this was probably bound to happen.

Warner Bros. is developing a new film titled Worst Tinder Date Ever. It’ll be fashioned as a romantic comedy, spearheaded by screenwriters David A. Newman and Keith Merryman (Think Like a Man). The story, naturally, will revolve around people who go on catastrophic Tinder dates, but eventually find love.

Considering Tinder’s infiltration into the modern dating world and pop culture both, it was only a matter of time before the insanely popular app got the Hollywood treatment. And it’s far from the first app to land a movie deal: Angry Birds, based on the popular mobile game, did superbly well at the box office last May, aided by a sterling voice cast which included Jason Sudeikis, Maya Rudolph, Peter Dinklage, and more. The animated EMOJIMOVIE: Express Yourself has also hopped into the fray, with Silicon Valley star T.J. Millerjoining the cast as main character Gene. That movie will hit theaters summer 2017.

But Tinder’s mainstream popularity means that it’s already found its way into plenty of storylines in film and TV, not to mention parodies on shows like New Girl,Broad City, and The Mindy Project (which delightfully dubbed its own Tinder copycat “Pork It”). In addition, movies about online dating gone awry are also nothing new. The only thing that is new here is dropping “Tinder” right into the title.

So if we’re going to get a Tinder movie, wouldn’t it be a lot more interesting if it instead covered the origin story of Tinder itself, à la The Social Network? After all, the app’s got all the drama of Facebook’s founding—a young dude (co-founder and C.E.O. Sean Rad) dropping out of college to pursue digital dreams, serious leadership shakeups, and a lawsuit that came to symbolize the ugliness of bro-dominated start-up culture—plus the fact that we’re talking about a saucy app designed specifically for dating and hookups. A million matches isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion matches, which Tinder hit in 2014. Put on your Stefon voice, because this movie has everything. At least, it would, if Warner Bros. were making it instead of Worst Tinder Date Ever.